


More Missing Stories - Bester Saved The World

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [172]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How canon misled you, Mention of the Earth-Minbari War, Mention of the Shadow War, Psi Corps, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-02-23 04:21:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23872234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: "Hey, why don't we drop a single sentence in the book - a vague line with no context or explanation - instead of ever telling the story it refers to? Yeah! What an excellent idea!"Unfortunately, the writers do this A LOT. And these aren't throwaway lines with nothing behind them - they are real stories, and important stories. They cut out how Bester worked with EarthForce during the Earth-Minbari War, for example.They also cut out how Bester's squadron defended Earth (and saved Earth) during the Shadow War. It's canon that Sheridan knows what happened. It's canon that even Garibaldi knows what happened.But somehow, you don't.I discuss the missing stories.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!
Series: Behind the Gloves [172]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/677654
Comments: 22
Kudos: 5





	More Missing Stories - Bester Saved The World

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

I already started discussing some of the missing stories of the Psi Corps Trilogy books in this essay [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23849389), in particular, some of the key stories that took place during Bester's lifetime.

Often, the books include a scene with little or no explanation as to what is happening and why, and never tell the larger - very important - story. Other times, the books drop a single line, a single line about something VERY, VERY IMPORTANT, and then never explain that, either.

I already mentioned one of these moments. In Deadly Relations, on page 202, the book says:

"Indeed, he and Johnston would have a personal meeting one day, to discuss purely personal matters - that was certain."

What this actually means is that Bester, for the past fifteen or twenty years, has been actively planning a sophisticated plot to kill Psi Corps director Johnston. We see exactly none of this until suddenly, we're at the climax of the untold story - out of nowhere.

But this is hardly the only example. Oh no, it just gets worse. Most of these key missing stories aren't in the book _at all_.

Page 207 says:

"But the madman's defenses were too powerful, too _alien_. It was as if McDwyer's brain had been imprinted with something not Human at all - it didn't react like a Human brain, or even like the Minbari prisoners Bester had scanned during the war."

Oh! What's that? Bester had a key role in the Earth-Minbari War, the war that's completely cut out of the book? Oh!!!

Heaven forbid we show him doing something that HELPS SAVE EARTH.

This is not random - they explicitly cut out EVERYTHING he did, here and later in the Shadow War, to save Earth. These omissions are intentional, because they want to push a _canonically false_ narrative that he never did these things/was an "enemy". That's the narrative of his life that mundanes wrote after his trial, but it doesn't extend just to that universe - that is the same narrative they're pushing in the books _themselves_.

So, about the Earth-Minbari War - later in the book, we see the top secret joint Psi Corps/EarthForce base on Ganymede, where these Minbari rendition scans took place. Byron asks about the base on pages 250 and 251, and Bester tells him it's "hush hush." "You really don't want to know what they do here, Byron." "It's on a need-to-know basis." Well, sure, I wouldn't trust that dip with any important intel either, but hey, _you do have to tell the readers_.

There's a whole story there, and since they never tell you, I will have to do it. Yes, during the war, Bester did work with EarthForce - he wasn't "buddies" with Ben Zion, haha no, but this is where they ran into each other.

Then there's the Shadow War. They don't want to tell you about that, either. The show just says "we're working with Bester now, that was unexpected" and then never tells you what that line means. Bester also mentions the Corps' military confrontations with the Shadows in _Dust to Dust_ , but they never explain that line, either. Funny that.

The books also mention these missing stories. See Final Reckoning, p. 46-47:

He returned to the hotel. It had rained, so his shoes broke pastel puddles, wet canvases left by the downpour and painted by the sunset. The silver-winged silhouettes of swallows spun in the lambent air, and for an instant he saw, not birds, but Black Omega Starfuries coursing across the universe-devouring face of Jupiter. _His_ ships, _his_ people, unstoppable. He trembled, with the thought of what he had been. He brought down governments, diverted rivers of destiny to fill new oceans. Without him, the Shadows would have won, destroyed all of humanity.

That never seemed to come up, at the hearing. He had never seen it once in any of the gory stories about him.

Sheridan knew. Sheridan the hero, the one honest man. He knew, but remained oddly silent. Garibaldi knew, too.

Of course Garibaldi wasn't a big-picture sort of man. Garibaldi only cared about Garibaldi - what Garibaldi liked or didn't like. What had given Garibaldi pleasure, what had hurt him. Especially what had hurt him. There was probably a wasp somewhere that had stung Garibaldi when he was five, that his operatives were still trying to track down...

OK, so there are several missing stories here. We've got the Shadow War, and we've got the first hearing, and we've got possible references to the Telepath War, too, but I'm just going to discuss the first Big Missing Story, the Shadow War.

"Coursing across the universe-devouring face of Jupiter."

[Here is a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYC_Z36rHw) showing what the planets would look like if they were as close to Earth as the Moon is.

The distance of the Earth to the Moon is 238,900 miles (approximately).

The distance of Jupiter to Io is 220,000 miles (approximately). A little closer - so Jupiter's a little _bigger_.

And what's at Io? Oh, the SOL SYSTEM JUMPGATE! And as the only route in and out of the Sol system, it's pretty important. That's why EarthForce has a huge base (Io station) defending it!

During the Shadow War, Psi Corps - Bester's squadron _personally_ \- engaged the Shadows at the Io station jumpgate, and defeated them, saving Earth from invasion.

Gee, doesn't that key battle warrant more than one sentence? Isn't that an important story?

It's also a story that Sheridan knows, and even Garibaldi knows.

I don't know why the books show Bester kissing up to Sheridan in the scene above... I have no idea what makes that jerk the "one honest man." Maybe it's another missing story. Or maybe it's canon bias again. [Edit: See comments below - it's SARCASM! How did I miss this?] I don't know everything, at least yet. I don't know how this jives with what we see in the show (Sheridan? Honest?), and even what Bester thinks later in the same book, when Sheridan dies (Final Reckoning, p. 249):

Sheridan had been no friend of Bester's and he'd been a hypocrite besides. They said the best revenge was living well; it wasn't. It was much simpler than that. It was seeing your enemies die.

So why is he kissing his ass? Why does he even think Sheridan could even have defended him at the trial?

Page 240:

It might have been different, he mused, if Sheridan had come. Perhaps Sheridan would have even said something good about him. After all, Sheridan understood, as the rest of these insects did not. Understood about the sacrifices one made for the common good, the stains one would accept on one's own soul when something higher was at stake.

Maybe there's another missing story. Or maybe it's wishful thinking. Sheridan sure didn't show up.

I still don't know everything, but my point is that these things happened, and the canon books intentionally cut them out to present their biased version of events. After all, if the books omit everything, then there's no other way that anyone could ever know... right? /snerk/

The books are being even less honest to you than Garibaldi. (Wow.) But they have the gall to bill the series as "the secret history of Psi Corps."

/facepalm/

There's another reference to these events later in the trial scene. Bester says in that scene (p. 243-244):

"You blame me for continuing to fight the war that started in 2115? You blame me for defending my people? I suppose you do. Psi Corps was developed to keep telepaths in their place. An act of war, of suppression. You want to know who the real telepathic Resistance was? It was _us_. Protecting ourselves against you. Sure, along the way we protected you, too, whether you knew it or not, and more than you will _ever_ know."

Yes, because the whole history of the Corps' engagement with the Shadows - at Io and elsewhere - is classified. And it wasn't even "the Corps" doing it - Bester was operating independently of the Corps leadership at that point. He wasn't taking orders from Geneva. But then the Telepath War happened, and after that, mundanes had to expunge this from history. (And so it also got expunged from _the show_ and from _these books_.)

At the end of the book, it says (p. 248-249):

James [the jailer] left, and Bester fought the gloom by working on his memoirs. He was nearly done with them, had been nearly done with them for years. He just kept fiddling. He liked to fiddle with his history - it was the only thing he still had control of, his version of things. Let the historians wrangle endlessly about what was true and what wasn't. _He_ knew, and they didn't, and it was the only power he still had.

Well, that and the power of his predictions, of his insights. Those would validate him, one day.

Maybe in that world, maybe not - except how are readers here supposed to understand, if canon's intentionally cutting out the whole story (along with plenty of other stories along the way)? I know JMS intended to tell (his version of) the Telepath War, but I think there were plenty of things he never intended to tell you.

That's why I'm doing this.

**Author's Note:**

> From Final Reckoning, p. 245, at the trial:
> 
> _"He suddenly felt very old, and very tired, and very, very alone. He had killed - the one person in the universe who might have spoken for him."_
> 
> Except it didn't turn out that way, did it?


End file.
